Attending a ceremony at the spot just north of Gdansk (Danzig) where hostilities broke out in Europe 70 years ago, Polish president Lech Kaczynski said this:

Westerplatte is a symbol, a symbol of the heroic fight of the weaker against the stronger… It is proof of patriotism and an unbreakable spirit. Glory to the heroes of those days, glory to the heroes of Westerplatte, glory to all the soldiers who fought in World War Two against German Nazism, and Bolshevik totalitarianism.

Commemorating the sacrifices of those who fought against the evil of Nazism continues to be imperative (and for those wanting an impression of those terrible September days in Danzig, the relevant sequences in Volker Schlöndorff’s filmed version of Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum are a good place to start), but the last three words in that extract from Kaczynski’s remarks are also worth remembering, seventy years after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact that gave a Kremlin green light to Hitler’s attack on Poland, seven decades after the Soviet invasions of Poland and Finland, and seven decades after the USSR began its move into the three neutral Baltic states (the annexation-to use too mild a word-of those countries followed a few months later, along with the brutal Soviet land grab in Romania).

In an attempt to distract attention from the USSR’s role that autumn as Hitler’s enabler and accomplice, Moscow has, with characteristic lack of grace, now chosen to release files purporting to show that Poland had previously tried to destabilize the Stalinist regime. Even if these allegations are true, these alleged Polish plots would have to be seen in the context of the two decades of Soviet subversion in central and western europe that followed the Bolshevik revolution, not to speak of the Soviet onslaught on Poland in 1919–20. Would they have been a reasonable response to Moscow’s machinations? Yes. A reasonable casus belli? No.

It’s long past time that Vladimir Putin came to terms with history’s inconvenient truths.